“She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.”

“What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.”

“She can put her life in Mitch's strong hands and fall at once into a dreamless sleep. In a sense, that is what marriage is about-a good marriage-a total trusting with your heart, your mind, your life.”

“As he entered her, as the piston of lovemaking grew slick with her clear oils, she thought about beingcrushed to death in his arms, and she - thought how odd it was for her to consider such a thing, and howmuch stranger still to consider it without fear and with something very like desire, a melancholy longing, acuriously pleasant anticipation, not a death wish but a sweet resignation,and she knew that Dr. Cauvelwould say this was a sign of her sickness, that now she was preparedto surrender even her ultimateresponsibility(the fundamental responsibility for her own life, for deciding whether or not she wasworthy of life), and he would say that she needed to rely more on herself and less on Max, but she didn'tcare, didn't care at all; she just felt the power, Max's power, and began to call his name, dug her fingersinto his unyielding muscle and surrenderedwillingly.”

“Why I love him is, I don't know, because he seems very brave and kind and sweet. All that stuff but something else, too. I don't know what something else, but he's different somehow, and what I'm trying to say is it's a good kind of difference, whatever it is.”

“If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures. ”

“She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.”